The situation in Nevada is ripe for what has become a primary Republican strategy in the election. Millions of new voters have registered this year, many of them from traditionally disenfranchised groups: the poor, the young, and people of color. A majority of these new voters are clearly fall into the Obama camp, so the GOP has mounted a campaign to root out what it claims is widespread voter fraud.

They claim that people are registering to vote multiple times, or under false names, or in the wrong jurisdictions, or are not entitled to vote (for example, because they are have no home address or are undocumented immigrants or convicted felons).

As the New York Times put it in an editorial last year, "In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people." The myth of voter fraud is a powerful tool to combat the expansion of Obama's voting base. And the tactic is clearly alive and well in Nevada, where the following stories emerged in the past week alone:

1) Last Tuesday, members of the new "Election Integrity Task Force," under the leadership of Nevada's Secretary of State Ross Miller (a Democrat, by the way), raided the Las Vegas office of the ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has registered thousands of low-income people. They seized eight computers and twenty boxes of documents, citing allegations of fraudulent registrations made by ACORN. "We've been told that some of the allegedly erroneous applications even included the names of players from the Dallas Cowboys football team," Miller said. It's no surprise that ACORN's work is under scrutiny: They have registered more than 100,000 new voters in Nevada alone.

2) In Washoe County, so many Democrats have registered to vote that the two party's numbers are now virtually even where Republicans once had a sizable lead. In response, the local Republican Party is disputing what it claims may be fraudulent registrations. In an obvious reference to the ACORN case, country GOP chair Heidi Smith declared last Thursday: "We're going to request a list of all registered Democrats to check for all the Dallas Cowboys and 49ers and any 'Sherwin Williams' or anything out of the ordinary." Smith said she was disputing the registrations after receiving numerous complaints from Republican voters who had received flawed registration cards. The Washoe County Registrar, however, said he had received no reports of voter card errors.

For more examples, vote suppression tactics in Nevada are being tracked on some local blogs, including Desert Beacon, and Zeke Says So.